Northern Wisconsin is filled with towering trees that loom over its history and culture. The area has been shaped by logging since the 1800s. That history is celebrated in Hayward, WI every year with the Lumberjack World Championships, which took place in July. But the lumber industry also played a key role in the displacement of local Indigenous communities.
To learn more about that part of northern Wisconsin’s history, I met David Bisonette on the Lac Courte Oreilles, or LCO, reservation. Bisonette is a former teacher at LCO College and a tribal member. He says a series of treaties opened the door to widespread logging across northern Wisconsin and Minnesota. But the treaties led to large areas of Ojibwe land being ceded to the U.S. government.
I spoke with Bisonette at the LCO Tribal Museum. Bisonette explains one of the major treaties in 1854.
“It dealt with like a land cession in the northeastern part of Minnesota, but it also established reservations because one of the things that they had tried to do is they had tried to remove us from Wisconsin over to Minnesota, but the people here refused to go, so the government wouldn't give them their annuities, their money, their goods, because they were trying to force them to leave, but they wouldn't leave. So because of that, they said, OK, you guys can stay where you want to stay here on this reservation, but when you read the treaty, they just set aside three townships. It's not specific about, like, where are the three townships,” says Bisonette.
As lumber mills moved north in search of the precious timber, they ran into Ojibwe villages. Loggers and tribal members exchanged goods, work and language, which Bisonette says concerned mill owners.
“They get the complaint from the logging company, so the government sends an agent to investigate what's going on. And so, then he recommends these people should be put on the reservation, but then they're like, 'Oh, but we haven't chosen a reservation yet. So, the very first reservation then that the people at La Courte Oreilles asked for was actually down south of Rice Lake on this prairie lake,” says Bisonette.
For Ojibwe communities, living on a rice lake meant access to wild rice, a vital food source.
But when it came time to establish reservation boundaries, the government was reluctant to give up the most valuable land.
After years of disputes, the Lac Courte Oreilles Reservation was finalized in 1872.
Some tribal members were also given allotments, private pieces of land to promote assimilation. But some of these allotments ended up in the hands of white settlers.
Bisonette points to a document in the LCO tribal museum listing allotment recipients. For women, the document notes if they have white husbands.
“The reason they were asking about like, are you married to like a white man, is right like if you saw that movie, but the Osage people right, it happened everywhere where these men would show up and marry a woman and then woman was dead and then who got the land,” says Bisonette.
Bisonette says the government also intervened to limit tribal members’ ability to profit from their land.
“Then there's another court decision that says, oh well, tribal members can't sell their, they can't sell their own timber on their own land, and they can only sell so much. The intent was that they didn't want Ojibwe people to like control their own money and their own destiny, basically," Bisonette says.
Today, logging doesn’t play a prominent role on the LCO reservation.
“You know, other than, those time periods where people were making money from doing those things. It actually becomes like an economic activity that just, it didn't kind of really continue, you know, for, you know, just individual families,” says Bisonette.
The logging industry has left a historical and physical mark on the Northwoods of Wisconsin. But it holds different meaning for Indigenous communities.
